by BERNARD CHIKETO
BARBARA Rwodzi, Zimbabwe’s tourism minister, took her investment roadshow to Atlanta recently. Her audience was not a gathering of American hoteliers or sovereign wealth funds, but a cluster of Zimbabwean expatriates.
The goal: to persuade them that their hard-earned dollars are better spent on lodges and conference centres back home than on mortgages in the American suburbs.
The forum, hosted at Zimbabwe’s embassy in Georgia, marks the latest iteration of Harare’s broader “engagement and re-engagement” foreign policy—a diplomatic pivot that favours suasion over sanctions-bashing.
But beneath the glad-handing lay a harder economic calculus.
Remittances from the United States alone account for roughly 12% of Zimbabwe’s total inward flows, a vital liquidity buffer for a country chronically short of foreign exchange. Over the past three years, these private transfers have proved more reliable than portfolio investment or official aid.
The government now wants a chunk of that cash to shift from consumption—school fees, groceries, funerals—to fixed capital formation.
Minister Rwodzi’s presentation dangled a menu of opportunities: rural tourism, cultural heritage projects, gastronomy, waste management and renewable energy, all anchored by the ministry’s cluster strategy and improved regional air links.
The Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency (ZIDA) and the Reserve Bank also made appearances, offering technical hand-holding and the usual assurances of a red-carpet welcome.
David Hamadziripi, Zimbabwe’s ambassador in Washington, framed the event as a natural extension of the “Zimbabwe is Open for Business” mantra, though he was careful to praise the diaspora for their existing contribution rather than scold them for their absence.
The subtext, however, was inescapable.
For a government that has struggled to attract meaningful foreign direct investment outside the extractives sector, the diaspora represents a captive, culturally aligned pool of capital that is less susceptible to the headline risks—currency volatility, policy reversals and governance concerns—that scare off Western institutional money.
The minister described tourism as a “low-hanging fruit”, a characterisation that is both accurate and damning. It implies a sector ripe for the picking, yet one that has languished for lack of patient domestic capital.
Yet the sceptic’s view is worth airing. Diaspora Zimbabweans have watched previous waves of repatriated savings evaporate through currency collapses and restrictive exchange-control regimes.
Remittances remain a lifeline precisely because they bypass the state apparatus, flowing directly to families. Converting those flows into illiquid assets—hotels and chalets—is an opportunity that government hopes diasporans embrace.
For now, Harare is doing what it does best: listening, nodding and pitching. The diaspora, for their part, are asking sharp questions about clarity and returns.
That alone marks an improvement over the antagonism of the past decade
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